I'm not known for being politically correct, but I certainly don't want this to sound ignorant. There are obviously differences between various Asian groups' appearances, Japanese and Chinese always seeming to be the stereotypical one for us Westerners. I know I see differences between them but how would they be described? And approximately how many different ones are there? Are they fairly well defined by country? IOW is there also a Korean, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Filipino etc. 'look' ?

I'm not so much talking about culture (i.e. clothing, hairstyles etc.) as I am about physical facial appearance. But while we're at it you could include cultural factors too (as I don't know much about the specifics of those either!)

I think of northern Asians as being bigger and stockier and southeast Asians as being more slight. Northern Asians also seem to me to have more obvious epicanthic folds for eyelids. One complicating factor is that almost every country has an ethnic Chinese minority, members of which (IME) are more worldly and open to talking to outsiders.

To start off, it should be noted that China encompasses dozens of different ethnicities besides the majority one, known as Han, from Mongolians to Uigurs to Miao, each of which has different characteristics.

Some indicators are obvious, like skin tone. For example, in most cases a dark complexion instantly narrows it down to either Cambodian, Filipino, or Thai.

I've met a woman of Vietnamese extraction who was surprisingly dark.

There's a lot of individual variation in any case, but there are things you notice if you look at a lot of people from different ethnicities. Given facial features don't map clearly onto language groups, but there is a certain eyelid shape that's stereotypically "Mongol", a sort of nose that's stereotypically Korean or Japanese (though most people in those countries don't have it), a sort of facial bone structure that appears in Chinese faces a lot (but also westward all the way to Europe)--it's pretty subtle all told.

It's like talking about Europeans. Do Spanish folk really look that different from people from Portugal? Do Germans look that different from the Dutch? Do the Irish look that different from Norwegians? You can talk about a "Mediterranean" appearance or a Scandanavian "look", and maybe if you're sensitive you'll be able to distinguish a Eastern European from a Central European. But there aren't any hard and fast rules to decide who is who. Every trait that you can pin on one group is shared by another. At least, that has been my experience.

A lot of Asians think they can tell the difference, but you're right, they really can't.

It used to be a game my cousins and I played as kids, and the vast majority of the time we were right (when we asked them), but we weren't going on appearance alone. We were primarily around Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, with a peppering of Japanese or Thai, so having to guess from mostly just 3 choices wasn't that difficult; we also had geographic location/neighborhood to consider, and we often had or asked their last name which was a dead giveaway (unless it was "Lee").

While nationalities don't necessarily determine appearance, it does shape behavior to a great degree. If I'm trying to guess the homeland of a stranger from Asia it's often his or her behavior that informs me more than physical traits.

All Look Same is a website run by a Japanese man living in America, and is all about the misconceptions about the physical and cultural similarities between East Asians, mainly Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. There's a fun little exam room where visitors can take picture quizzes to see if they can distinguish between the three countries when looking at people, food, and artwork.

While nationalities don't necessarily determine appearance, it does shape behavior to a great degree. If I'm trying to guess the homeland of a stranger from Asia it's often his or her behavior that informs me more than physical traits.

(Had the Asian female images been presented with the nationalities stated but unassigned I think I'd have done much better-than-random for assignment. Clicking "closeups" on the linked page gives, I think, a different collection, but "zoomed" versions of the images are available at another Googleable page.)

These are not images of people chosen to be typical. Instead photos of several different people were chosen for each case and a composite face developed algorithmically.

When I was living in Japan I heard Koreans described as typically having a round "frying pan" face. That doesn't sound very nice and I apologize if it's the equivalent of saying "hook-nosed Jew" or something, but I heard that exact phrase more than once.

I've never been to Korea, so I'm not sure if Koreans make "Why the long face?" jokes about the Japanese.

All Look Same is a website run by a Japanese man living in America, and is all about the misconceptions about the physical and cultural similarities between East Asians, mainly Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. There's a fun little exam room where visitors can take picture quizzes to see if they can distinguish between the three countries when looking at people, food, and artwork.

I truly think that test was designed as a 'gotcha', using un-stereotypical faces.

I can at a glance in general tell Chinese people from Japanese people in most cases. Not just from behaviour and clothing: in my observation most Japanese people have thinner, more prominent and triangular noses than most Chinese people, who tend to have wider, flatter noses with a less prominent bridge. Japanese people also seem to have more oval faces while Chinese faces tend to be round, and eyes that are taller at the mid-point than Chinese.

I know these are vast generalities that "all look same" tries to debunk, but walk with me through a Chinese city and I'll prove it to you. You can see what I'm talking about in the 'average person' graphic.

I can usually tell northern Chinese from southern, and Filipinos from Thais, but I'm hopeless with Koreans and south-east Asians. In particular, Burmese/Cambodian/Thai/Indonesian are usually impossible for me to distinguish between.

Agree with Jjimm that All Look Same cherry picked the genepool as well as features Asian Americans generally dressed in trendy clothes.

We've had many of these threads in the past. I'd say there is a % of people that obviously look Japanese or Korean or Chinese. Not sure what that % would be 50%, more/less? But some are very obvious. There is a stereotypical Shanghaiese face with actress Joan Chen as an example that glaringly obvious in WAG 10% of the time. There is a stereotypical Taiwanese face that is much the same. Northern and southern Han Chinese look different. Forget the non-Han Chinese (Tibetan, Dai, Miao, etc)

A lot of Asians think they can tell the difference, but you're right, they really can't.

It used to be a game my cousins and I played as kids, and the vast majority of the time we were right (when we asked them), but we weren't going on appearance alone. We were primarily around Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, with a peppering of Japanese or Thai, so having to guess from mostly just 3 choices wasn't that difficult; we also had geographic location/neighborhood to consider, and we often had or asked their last name which was a dead giveaway (unless it was "Lee").

Similarly, my wife has had people speak Vietnamese to her in a Vietnamese restaurant and Korean when she's in a Korean grocery store. She's Chinese.

On another occasion, a group of Asian men was touring the bank when I was working. I asked my (Chinese) coworker if she knew where the group was from. She said "All I know is that they aren't Chinese. They must be Korean." Wrong. I think some of them were even from Beijing, her home town.

I'm glad some Asian dopers brought up the "we can spot them" angle because that is something that I, and I think most Westerners, assume to be true. Makes sense that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't (which basically means it isn't!)

I think the point of All Look Same is that looks are not divided neatly across national borders and that it's the culture that separates people, not a certain look, whatever that is. And if you think the site is one big gotcha shpeal, it's because you have some sort of preconceived notion in your head, and there are going to be plenty of people who don't fit some arbitrary profile, probably more than those who actually do. That is partly why the implementation always fails in the real world.

For example, if you say the Koreans on the site do not look like a "typical" Korean - gotcha move? Um no, I can list many people of Korean descent who have those similar looks. I also know many people of Chinese descent who look like the Chinese people identified on the site. Same with the Japanese folks. It is not a gotcha move to me at all. People like to think they can differentiate Asians, in theory, but in my own unscientific experience, it is a whole different story in the real world.

Another reason that the whole guessing game fails is because the idea of what constitutes a stereotypical look morphs across time and space. I have found that lots of people across Asia don't even really have a unified concept of a "typical" look for each ethnic group. In my two-year stint in Japan, I've had dozens of Japanese swearing up and down that I absolutely look like a Nihonjin and when finding out that I was not, set off this whole firestorm every time of, "Man, you really can't tell who is and isn't these days!" (well, duh). Or my Taiwanese friends and relatives divided on whether I look like I'm from HK (bwuh?) or if I am a doppelganger for Hebe Tian (a Tawainese). Or random Korean grandpas siddling up to me and chatting me up in the park as if I were Korean. Or my classmates from my middle school days in Singapore telling me I looked totally Taiwanese. Right... so to the Japanese, I look Japanese. To the Taiwanese, I look "maybe" like I'm from HK, but "maybe" Taiwanese and quite possibly "other". To some Koreans, I look Korean I guess. And to Singaporeans, I look Taiwanese. Impressive...

Anyway, this is not the type of thing where you can get a straight answer, but based on my own experiences and those of my Asian friends who've dealt with these guessing games in various countries, I'm with D_Odds and DCinDC

Quote:

Originally Posted by hogarth

Similarly, my wife has had people speak Vietnamese to her in a Vietnamese restaurant and Korean when she's in a Korean grocery store. She's Chinese.

I took the test many years ago and ended up with a 60% score, but that was during a period when the majority of my Internet time was spent downloading photos of Japanese and Korean women, so I had some "experience" guiding me. The majority of my incorrect answers were photos of men, or women with "outlandish" makeup that effectively disguised subtle clues I might otherwise have picked up on. I also don't think I realized at the time that the people in the photos were Asians living in America. If some or all of them were raised in the US, that would affect body language, which is another subtle clue.

I've noticed that distinguishing between native Japanese and Korean women is made more difficult by the fact that Japanese fashion seems to be quite popular amongst Korean girls/women; not just clothing, but also hair and makeup. Also, plastic surgery is apparently rampant in both countries, and has the frequent result of removing a lot of ethnic distinctiveness.

... the majority of my Internet time was spent downloading photos of Japanese and Korean women, ...

Don't leave us in suspense. Were you an Interpol agent looking for female fugitives?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mister Rik

... plastic surgery is apparently rampant in both countries ...

At least two young Thai singers appeared on the Bangkok music scene, raced to the top of the charts partly due to their gorgeous faces, then fell out of favor because -- well, what would you do if you were a young woman with a spectacularly beautiful face who suddenly found herself with a pile of money in her bank account? -- they got nose jobs.

So white people believe they could do a reasonable job telling apart Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Russian & Greek and yet when Asians claim they can do the same across a similarly large land mass, they must be making it all up?

So white people believe they could do a reasonable job telling apart Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Russian & Greek and yet when Asians claim they can do the same across a similarly large land mass, they must be making it all up?

Although I agree with the conclusion invited by your rhetorical question, in fairness, there are considerably more differences in appearance between many of those ethnicities than between (east) Asians. I know in Japan they have words for the number of eye folds, but in general you're looking at the same hair and eye colour at least.

So white people believe they could do a reasonable job telling apart Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Russian & Greek ...

Who are the white people that claim they can do so based on portrait photographs? (A portrait photograph takes away all other contextual clues that give away huge clues such as language, accents, mannerisms, clothing, etc.).

If you are just talking about facial features, I put it to you that it would be trivial to make such a portrait test of Europeans that self-professed experts would fail. Just like I could easily make a test that was completely fair in terms of the rules for 'asian peoples' that all the so-called experts would also fail.

I don't believe white people can identify European ethnic groups either.

Yeah, they may be able to distinguish a Spaniard from a Irish person from a Russian. But Irish from British? Russian from Norwegian? Spaniard from Greek? French from Italian? And more importantly, be able to describe the differences? I don't buy it.

Don't leave us in suspense. Were you an Interpol agent looking for female fugitives?

Obviously. Keep it on the downlow.

Actually, I had taken up the hobby of using Photoshop to create desktop wallpapers of female celebrities. I was becoming frustrated with with the available American and European photo sources, due to the stinginess and low-quality of available photos. This was still in the early days of the Internet (mid- to late-90s) and most celebrities didn't have huge online presences yet, so what was available were amateur scans of, at best, 3" x 5" paparazzi photos from cheap weekly magazines, usually with text printed all over them. These work very poorly when blown up to full-screen size for wallpapers.

Then I discovered Japan. Japan has these things called "photobooks", in which they publish professionally posed and shot, high-quality photos of an individual celebrity. The photos are mostly full-page sized and printed on high-quality glossy paper, and have no/minimal text covering up the person in the photos. On top of that, there is/was a whole subculture of talented "scan artists" who would scan these photos, clean them up digitally (some even able to scan a two-page photo, stitch the two halves together, and clean it up so well that you couldn't detect the seam), and post them in collections on the Internet. These large, sharp, high-resolution photos were absolutely perfect material for making desktop wallpapers, and I promptly dropped the American & European models in favor of Japanese.

Is there a name for the logical fallacy where one seizes on exceptions to a rule to justify the assertion that the rule itself is spurious? It seems like this is what always comes up in these threads -- I can say that IME many Japanese (not all) tend to have beakier noses and heavier eyelids than Chinese of my acquaintance. Someone will inevitably come back with, "oh yeah? Well *this* person doesn't, so you're full of s__t!" with a bit of implied charge of racism or at least stupidity thrown in.

Sort of like, "you think Kenyans tend to be good runners? My friend Bob is from Kenya and he runs like my grandmother -- so you're racist for thinking that!"

So white people believe they could do a reasonable job telling apart Scandinavian, Irish, Spanish, Russian & Greek and yet when Asians claim they can do the same across a similarly large land mass, they must be making it all up?

I don't think anyone's arguing that regional variations in appearance don't exist at all. But those particular variations aren't necessarily that unique, and therefore people tend to overestimate their ability to identify people based on those variations.

For instance, if someone shows me a random group of "average" Dutch and Greek men and try to identify them, I might be able to do better than chance by guessing that any tall blond men are Dutch and that any shorter dark-haired men are Greek. But there are lots of tall blond men in the world who aren't Dutch as well. If I don't have any other contextual clues, then I'm going to do pretty poorly if I guess that every tall blond person I meet in the course of my life is Dutch (considering I don't live in Holland).

Similarly, just because my wife has a round face (say), that doesn't make her Korean or Vietnamese -- there are lots and lots of Chinese with round faces, too.

For instance, if someone shows me a random group of "average" Dutch and Greek men and try to identify them, I might be able to do better than chance by guessing that any tall blond men are Dutch and that any shorter dark-haired men are Greek.

This analogous to what we are saying. If you've spent time in Asia, some of the people within a "race" have stereotypical qualities of that race. Compare a stereotypical looking Tibetan and a stereotypical looking Thai, and it's going to be pretty obvious which is which.

Which is not to say that there are no Thai that look Tibetan and vice versa. However in a reasonable amount of cases an observer can make an educated guess and have a higher hit ratio than at random. Thai and Tibetans probably are at least as obvious a difference as stereotypical Dutch and Greeks.

Is there a name for the logical fallacy where one seizes on exceptions to a rule to justify the assertion that the rule itself is spurious?

Yes, it's called the scientific method. But it's not relevant here because this topic has precious little to do with science (yet).

No one disputes that one can make experienced guesses about other people's ethnicity based on their appearance. And to all those (typically white guys) who do so, I offer my heartfelt congratulations when you are correct.

But most often I see spectacular fail. I'm reminded of attending a party where a Japanese person whispered to me that the "person over there is definitely not Japanese". Well, it turned out that the person he had identified was a member of the Japanese royal family. I don't know how much more Japanese you can get than that.

As to the science, so far we have answers to the OP including "round", "oval" and "wide" faces, and we also have a vote for beakish noses. If that ain't science I don't know what is.

It's a great skill to have, right up next to the "guess your weight" guy at the carnival, but probably with less chance of success attached to it.

I don't think you understand the definition of the scientific method very well. AFAIK it partly involves the use of statistical sampling to make estimates applicable to a larger population, within some acceptable margin of error, not to the exclusion of all possible errors. What I'm talking about is more like what I think of as "we can never know everything (given the exceptions that occur), so we therefore cannot know anything." Kind of like creationists pointing with glee at the gaps in the fossil record.

Which is not to say that there are no Thai that look Tibetan and vice versa. However in a reasonable amount of cases an observer can make an educated guess and have a higher hit ratio than at random.

Sometimes...but context can make a big difference.

For instance, suppose you were in Nanjing (say) and you guessed that every Thai-looking person you saw was actually from Thailand. What sort of success rate do you think you would have, in that situation?

I'm Filipino and many Asians (including fellow Filipinos) have a hard time correctly identifying where I'm from. It can be a fun game and they seem to enjoy trying to guess. I've also had many non-Filipino Asians start speaking to me in their native tongue. I once had Chinese food in Manhattan eons ago and the woman (Chinese, I guess) behind the counter was really struggling to figure me out, finally settling on Russian before I told her the truth.

My father's family tends to have more traditional Filipino features but my mother's family has more Spanish influenced features (my grandfather had blue eyes); she would be what we would call 'mestiza'. The combination of these is probably what throws people off. OTOH, there have been some who've identified me correctly at one glance.

I've heard some characterize Koreans as having 'box-y' faces.

FWIW I scored a 4 on that All Look Same exam. I tend to agree that the exam is rigged to throw you off, although I can't say I'm an expert at spotting the differences in real life anyway.

For instance, suppose you were in Nanjing (say) and you guessed that every Thai-looking person you saw was actually from Thailand. What sort of success rate do you think you would have, in that situation?

I assume you are excluding the Thai's that are ethnic Chinese.

I think in Nanjing that Thai's would stick out like a sore thumb. Honestly, in Nanjing most Chinese Americans would stick out. If we were in Nanjing, I could look for all sorts of clues in dress, personal space, mannerisms, types of muscles, etc. that would provide additional clues to just the facial appearance.

Being in a place with a dominant race (such as Han China), it is much more straightforward to identify someone not from there. It is analogous to the seeing a tall blonde nordic in Greece. It's possible the tall blonde has 100% Greek ancestry back for generations and generations, but

Actually, I had taken up the hobby of using Photoshop to create desktop wallpapers of female celebrities...

Ah, 'making desktop wallpapers' is what they're calling it these days, huh? 28 and I'm already out of touch with the hip jive.

**

Hmmmm... this thread. I agree that there are certain, rare faces that one could not mistake (for example I would never think Lucy Liu was Japanese). Furthermore, I still think one can make an educated guess about this thing. Of course, in reality, clothing and manner also make a big impression. Lastly, one must never forget about the possibility for spectacular fail. It's never a good idea to go off one's assumptions in this matter.

One small point for discussion, coming from somebody who lives in Japan. Korean women in Japanese media seem much curvier, more vivacious, more sexy. My experience with Korean women in general has been that they have a much more hourglass-esque figure, but I could very well be seeing only what I want to see. (And how.)

Oh, and another thing. My GF often gets asked whether she is Korean or Chinese. Meh.

One small point for discussion, coming from somebody who lives in Japan. Korean women in Japanese media seem much curvier, more vivacious, more sexy. My experience with Korean women in general has been that they have a much more hourglass-esque figure, but I could very well be seeing only what I want to see. (And how.)

I have yet to meet anyone who can reliably distinguish between third or fourth generation Japanese-, Korean- or Chinese-Americans. I've tested Japanese friends visiting the States, and have never gotten anything better than random

As is anyone who have lived for a good number of years in East Asia, I can (usually) pick out the natives, usually assisted by clothes, hair styles, hand bags, etc.

Ah, 'making desktop wallpapers' is what they're calling it these days, huh? 28 and I'm already out of touch with the hip jive.

No, seriously. I had a web site for them and everything for 3-4 years (600,000+ hits before I got tired of making wallpapers and took it down). I once even had a professional graphic designer e-mail to tell me that my typography was better than what he'd seen from many professional graphic designers

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